For a long time, it was just setting the default search provider to Google in exchange for a beefy stipend. Later, paid links in your new tab page were added. Then, a proprietary service, Pocket, was bundled into the browser - not as an addon, but a hardcoded feature. In the past few days, we’ve discovered an advertisement in the form of browser extension was sideloaded into user browsers. Whoever is leading these decisions at Mozilla needs to be stopped.

Mozilla garnered a lot of fully deserved goodwill with the most recent Firefox release, and here they are, jeopardising all that hard work. People expect this kind of nonsense from Google, Apple, or Microsoft - not Mozilla. Is it unfair to judge Mozilla much more harshly than those others? Perhaps, but that's a consequence of appealing to more demanding users when it comes to privacy and open source.

Everybody likes free software; everybody likes to be paid for the job he does.

Mozilla is not an open source project carried on by volunteers in their free time, it's a foundation with paid employees and developers. For years they have made public their need for money to pay bills and salaries, that is why they also abandoned some projects (see Thunderbird) to concentrate only on Firefox. And to carry on a project like a modern web browser they need full time paid employees, it's unthinkable to develop such a projects using only volunteers in their free time.

If you want to contribute it's fairly easy, just open mozilla.org and in the top banner you will find what you are looking for. Or, if you are a developer, help writing code or testing in your free time, for free.

Mozilla is not an open source project carried on by volunteers in their free time, it's a foundation with paid employees and developers. For years they have made public their need for money to pay bills and salaries, that is why they also abandoned some projects (see Thunderbird) to concentrate only on Firefox. And to carry on a project like a modern web browser they need full time paid employees, it's unthinkable to develop such a projects using only volunteers in their free time.

"Unthinkable" is much too strong, but you are right even non-profits have employee salaries and bills to pay.

The problem for me is that I'm becoming less happy with their direction and their dismissal of user concerns over the years. It used to be the goto browser for developers everywhere, but I'm getting more annoyed by their opaque operations and bad policies. Like last year, when they decided to block addon sideloading and required developers to submit their own extensions to mozilla even when developers only want to install them on their own computers. Mozilla no longer allows me to take an open source extension and modify it for use on my computer, frankly this is bullshit. It's one of several things they've done to make me less inclined to support them.

You don't have to publish your extension on AMO. However, even if you are not intending to publish your extension on AMO, you do have to submit it to AMO so it can be reviewed and signed. Release versions of Firefox will refuse to install extensions that are not signed by AMO.

Also, while they're entitled to depreciate whatever they want in a particular release, they go further than that and use crypto to actively block developers from downgrading. I've come to expect this level of manipulation by large corporations, but for a non-profit it leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Note that once you have uploaded your extension to AMO, you can't then update the extension to use the Add-on SDK or legacy XUL/XPCOM techniques. If you do switch to one of these platforms, you must submit it as a completely new extension.

That is: porting from legacy extension systems to use WebExtension APIs is a one-way street.

Developer Edition (formerly Aurora channel), unbranded builds, and ESR channel have an about:config key which lets you turn off signing enforcement, so I've made sure to stay on one of them (with it off) at all times as a matter of principle.

It's only the branded Stable and Beta channel builds which force it on.

Then the wanted to write their own Phone-OS.
When that failed (after millions of wasted donations) they abandoned Thunderbird.

You are right, I forgot the doomed firefox-OS. But they were not alone in trying to build a new phone OS. Most of those efforts were doomed from the start, but it *might* have made sense back then. Now there is a firefox app both on iOS and Android, but how many use it ? (I don't).

Mozilla is left with only a "loyal" user base in the pc world which is getting thinner year after year. Funding will be a fight for survival in the next years otherwise it will be chrome-edge-safari, all proprietary.

Mozilla might not be the sinless angel, but for sure it is the lesser evil.

I wouldn't quite say they abandoned Thunderbird. Their argument that it's functionally completed software (other than bug fixes and simple maintenance) is technically true for the time being, given that it is an e-mail client, and it does everything an e-mail client needs to do, in many cases more correctly or sanely than many competitors.

Personally, I'm glad they quit trying to add new features, as those new features ended up being a pain in the arse on a rather frequent basis (like the whole handling of the Reply-To headers and mailing lists recently).

Songbird and Sunbird were two other really nice mozilla gecko projects. I really liked songbird for my music and sunbird had some nice features that windows calendar and apple calendar did not have at the time.